As many others have said, increasing vocabulary is probably the most important step towards fluency. Maybe that’s not true for everyone, but I don’t think I really felt comfortable having conversations until I had around 4,000 words in my passive vocabulary. I still need to move more of those over to my active vocabulary, but that is part of the reason I started this blog (to improve my speaking practice, which I really ought to do more of sometime soon…).

The journey to increase vocabulary is a long, slow, frustrating journey. So I thought I could share my progress here. I know it’s easy to feel like you are learning very little. But when you look back, you’ll see you’ve come a long way.